Stirring drama fuelled by real-life trauma
Boy Erased 15 cert, 115 min ★★★
Dir Joel Edgerton Starring Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Joel Edgerton, Xavier Dolan, Troye Sivan, Flea, Joe Alwyn
Gay conversion therapy, still legal in the UK and in 41 US States, is a hot enough topic that we need a great documentary about it, ideally excavating the history of the practice as well as the lack of scientific backing for any of the results still promised. Boy Erased, the 2016 memoir of Garrard Conley, tells a typical story: brought up as the son of a baptist pastor in Arkansas, he was outed in college and enrolled in intensive counselling by his parents, where he discovered a psychologically invasive programme of treatment that drove one fellow attendee to suicide.
Lucas Hedges continues a great run of form as “Jared” in Joel Edgerton’s film version, imbuing the role not just with torment but a nervous optimism that’s all the more affecting. At the start, he arrives apprehensively at the Love in Action treatment centre where his mother (a tackily bewigged Nicole Kidman) drops him off. Run by a formally unqualified head therapist, Victor Sykes (Edgerton), the place is architecturally indistinguishable from any number of new-build churches across the Midwest, with Sykes as a pulpit lecturer resorting to flip-charts about sin rather than overt fire-and-brimstone.
It’s the facility’s air of strict calm, even reason, that makes it creepily realistic. The film understands that this isn’t a particularly radical step for Jared’s family to be taking. In fact, every other aspect of his upbringing has involved tacit heteronormative grooming, so much so that stepping inside these four walls simply allows certain issues to be voiced which are otherwise stifled all day.
His father (Russell Crowe), gaining prestige as a preacher, owns a Ford dealership which Jared is expected to take over. He’s been nudged just as firmly into varsity basketball, where all the cheerleaders could hardly make gendered expectations any clearer: one of them is his girlfriend of two years, whom he’s supposed to marry. It comes as a huge shock – later, in flashback – when Jared’s parents hear him admit he likes men. Crowe’s Marshall flinches as if absorbing a body blow. It seems impossible, given everything this family has raised Jared to believe. But there it is.
As drama, the film is more scrupulous than high-voltage, a step down in verve from Edgerton’s unpredictable handling of The Gift. His structuring of this story through flashbacks keeps stalling it, sapping it of cumulative force. Kidman gets a couple of de rigueur awards-clip moments, including that old favourite, a finger-wagging “shame on you!” routine while indignantly driving off.
Crowe’s character might be a tougher nut to crack, but the film connects with him better, especially in the closing stretch, where it wheels around to decide exactly who needs converting here. He’s movingly stumped for words, battling his own lifelong conditioning in the face of a son’s earnest plea. Boy Erased could have been more sharply etched, all told. But the lessons of Conley’s experience fight manfully, all the same, to punch through. TR